Sally Heckel

Sally Heckel is an independent filmmaker best known for her award-winning dramatic short, A JURY OF HER PEERS, adapted from the 1917 short story by Susan Glaspell about a farm woman accused of murdering her husband in 1905 midwest America. Heckel adapted, produced, directed and edited the film. Among its awards are an Academy Award Nomination for best dramatic live-action short, Blue Ribbon Award from the American Film Festival, ATOM Award from Australian Teachers of Media, and Best Dramatic Film from Santa Fe Film Festival. The film was selected for international film festivals including Telluride Film Festival, USA; London Film Festival, England; Melbourne, Sydney and Perth Film Festivals in Australia; and Tampere Film Festival, Finland. It had distribution in Europe, and has become a classic in the US where it is shown in schools and universities as well as law schools.

Heckel has also made documentaries and animated films. Her sand animation, THE BENT TREE, a poetic visualization of a Yiddish folk song, has won several awards, including the Judge’s Award at Sinking Creek Film Celebration, and was shown in Festivals including Filmex in Los Angeles and the Ottawa International Animated Festival. THE BENT TREE is a timeless film, distributed by itself on video, and shown in 2001 at the Copenhagen Jewish Film Festival and the Stockholm Jewish Film Festival.

Heckel’s earlier films, IT’S NOT A ONE-PERSON THING, a documentary about a far-reaching organization of grass-roots cooperatives in the South that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, ORDINARY DAYS and LOU, both narratives about life in New York City, also won awards including the Judges’ Award at Sinking Creek Film Celebration, the Cine Golden Eagle, and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Heckel is a recipient of foundation grants as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Currently Heckel is finishing UNSPEAKABLE, a feature-length non-fiction narrative about her father’s suicide, its effect on her and her family, and her coming to terms with it years later. She wrote, produced, shot, and edited UNSPEAKABLE, combining elements of both documentary and dramatic films. Using home movies, evocative landscapes, silent scenes with actors, self-portraits, drawings, photos, narration and voice-over interviews (none on camera), Heckel has crafted a film in which images and sound work as counterpoints to one another, creating an inner experience of memory and discovery. (03/05)

A Jury of Her Peers
A film by Sally Heckel, 1980, 30 min., Color
On a desolate American farm in the early 1900's, a farmer is found murdered in his sleep and his wife is jailed as the prime suspect. The highly antic...